Articles Tagged "Editorial"

Environment: The alarmists want to place the world in servitude to the models that are predicting global warming. But those models can't even reconstruct the past.

A researcher at Sweden's University of Gothenburg analyzed climate models to see how closely their predictions fit with history, in this case, precipitation in China from 1961 to 2000. What Tinghai Ou found should crimp the alarmists' plans to establish regimes that punish and limit man's use of fossil fuels.

"Only a few climate models were able to reproduce the observed changes in extreme precipitation in China over the last 50 years," says the university's Department of Earth Sciences.

Ou himself said that the "results show that climate models give a poor reflection of the actual changes in extreme precipitation events that took place in China" during the period he examined.

"Only half of the 21 analyzed climate models were able to reproduce the changes in some regions of China," he said. "Few models can well reproduce the nationwide change."

The Tory part of the Coalition is beginning to recognise some painful truths, but it is time for the Coalition to tear up its energy policy before the lights go out.

With the worst snow conditions in the country since 1981, it’s worrying, to say the least, that gas supplies are running low. A month ago, The Sunday Telegraph warned in this column of the problems of an energy policy that puts expensive, inefficient green power before coal-fired and nuclear power. There have been a few signs that the Coalition is at last turning its attentions to the issue but, still, not nearly enough has been done. Now we are reaping the consequences. Because of a misguided faith in green energy, we have left ourselves far too dependent on foreign gas supplies, largely provided by Russian and Middle Eastern producers. Only 45 per cent of our gas consumption comes from domestic sources. All it takes is a spell of bad weather, and the closure of a gas pipeline from Belgium, to leave us dangerously exposed, and to send gas prices soaring. Talk of rationing may be exaggerated, but our energy policy is failing to deal with Britain’s fundamental incapacity to produce our own power.

Ed Davey, the Energy Secretary, may have granted planning permission this week to a new nuclear power station, Hinkley Point in Somerset. But one nuclear power station, with two new reactors, isn’t nearly enough. Moreover, it will take a decade to build and, even then, will only provide seven per cent of the country’s energy needs.

GREEN taxes have already added at least £100 a year to household energy bills and successive governments have viewed the threat of global warming and rising CO2 levels as a as a means of brow-beating the public while making them pay for the privilege.

Mysteriously, anything can be produced as evidence of global warming – hot weather, cold weather, wet weather and dry.

Climate change has become a religion and any diversion from the orthodox view is pounced on as evidence of heretical wickedness.

Those who beg to differ about the global warming creed are held up as wicked rather than merely sceptical.

But now new data from the Met Office is at odds with the doomy computer predictions from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The new data show that the pace of climate change has been wildly overestimated.

Scientists are admitting that warnings of global catastrophe were way off the mark. “The odds have come down”, admitted Myles Allen, Professor of Geosystem Science at Oxford University who until recently believed that we were in for an apocalyptic temperature rise of five degrees this century.

The new Met Office figures indicate that there has been no significant increase in the world’s temperature since 1997.

Politicians love cherry-picking science “facts” to support their own agendas.

Let’s see how they talk their way out of the Met Office’s inconvenient findings.

The implications of the inconvenient truth we publish today are profound. Since the Kyoto Treaty in 1997, Britain has been impoverishing itself in a lonely quest to cut its CO2 emissions – even though the world’s powerhouse economies, such as China and America, have refused to set any limits.

It is clear that the science, supposedly ‘settled’, is deeply uncertain, while growing numbers of experts now say that the effects of greenhouse gases are much less bad than they feared: any warming is going to happen much more slowly than they thought a few years ago.

It is time to join the dots. The way is open to solving this country’s most serious problems, all at once.

The Chancellor, pondering next week’s Budget, knows the US is not only avoiding a triple-dip recession but is also expecting more than three per growth this year. This is thanks mainly to ‘fracking’ for the natural shale gas beneath its soil, which produces 37 per cent of the CO2 emitted by coal when generating cheap, clean electricity.

In the US, once-moribund industries are being reborn, with jobs lost to China now returning home, while CO2 emissions are back to 1990 levels. Britain can follow this lead.

We too have vast reserves of shale gas, as yet untapped. The time has come to scrap the Energy Bill, together with existing ‘renewable’ energy subsidies. It is now clear that we have decades to come up with the really serious low- carbon energy sources which may one day be needed.

By abandoning wind, nuclear and other failed, risky or dubious ‘renewables’, and exploiting the benefits of shale gas, we can simultaneously boost our economy and shrink our national carbon footprint. It would be irresponsible to ignore such an opportunity.

Environment: For every scary piece of data held up by alarmists as proof of man-made global warming, it seems a bit of contrary evidence is uncovered — and, of course, is ignored. Let's see what Antarctica is telling us.

The professional fearmongers are predicting that Arctic sea ice will soon be gone during the warmer months of the year. This is supposed to worry us into action that "fights" global warming.

But then there's the fact, which we noted last week, that the Arctic's sea ice gain from the record low of summer 2012 is a record of its own.

We reported that we're in only the third winter in history in which more than 10 million square kilometers of new ice has formed in the Arctic.

We also mentioned that the Antarctic is nearing 450 days of uninterrupted above-normal ice.

That was last week. And this is this week: Antarctic sea ice is on an upward slope. Real Science, a science website, says it "has been increasing at a rate of half a million square kilometers per year.

"If this alarming trend continues, the planet will be completely covered with Antarctic ice in 1,000 years," said Real Science, using University of Illinois data to map out the trend and reach its conclusion. "The Australian coral reefs will freeze to death in less than 300 years."

Environment: The global warming alarmists repeat the line endlessly. They claim that there is a consensus among scientists that man is causing climate change. Fact is, they're not even close.

Yes, many climate scientists believe that emissions of greenhouse gases are heating the earth. Of course there are some who don't.

But when confining the question to geoscientists and engineers, it turns out that only 36% believe that human activities are causing Earth's climate to warm.

This is the finding of the peer-reviewed paper "Science or Science Fiction? Professionals' Discursive Construction of Climate Change" and this group is categorized as the "Comply with Kyoto" cohort.

Members of this group, not unexpectedly, "express the strong belief that climate change is happening, that it is not a normal cycle of nature, and humans are the main or central cause."

Academics Lianne M. Lefsrud of the University of Alberta and Renate E. Meyer of Vienna University of Economics and Business, and the Copenhagen Business School, came upon that number through a survey of 1,077 professional engineers and geoscientists.

Those who dare assert the Earth’s temperature isn’t on a perilous rise are derided as “deniers.” For liberals, the climate debate has ended, and it is an unquestionable article of faith that mankind’s carbon-dioxide emanations have set the stage for rising oceans, devastating hurricanes and disasters on a scale never before seen. To say otherwise is unthinkable, and that has created a dilemma. It’s not actually getting warmer.

In a paper published Tuesday, no less an authority than NASA scientist James E. Hansen wrote, “The 5-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade, which we interpret as a combination of natural variability and a slowdown in the growth rate of the net climate forcing.” Mr. Hansen is the intellectual godfather of the global-warming movement who advised Al Gore on his Oscar-winning climate-scare flick, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Mr. Hansen has just acknowledged more than the lack of warming. His words confirm nature, not mankind, played the decisive role in directing global temperatures over the past 10 years.

The anecdotal evidence has certainly not been friendly to climate hysteria. Southern England is covered in snow. Los Angeles has been shivering under what is — for Angelenos — a cold snap. The National Weather Service even issued a snow warning for the Washington area on Thursday. Frigid temperatures in January aren’t unusual, but the global-warming fanatics have been trying to pass off today’s climate as worse than the droughts and heat waves seen in the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s when carbon-dioxide emissions were far lower.

To put it mildly, it is a matter of enormous public interest that the Met Office has revised its predictions of global warming, whispering that new data suggest there will be none for the next five years.

After all, the projection implies that by 2017, despite a colossal increase in carbon emissions, there will have been no rise in the planet’s surface temperature for almost two decades.

Why, then, did the Met Office choose to sneak out this intriguing information on Christmas Eve, knowing there would be no newspapers the next day?

Isn’t the inescapable suspicion that our national forecaster was anxious not to shake confidence in its Messianic belief that we are destroying our own planet?

This paper keeps an open mind on climate change – and accepts that the Met Office’s revised prediction doesn’t prove the scientific establishment and its staunch disciples at the BBC wrong.

The signals could hardly be clearer: climate change is on the way, driven largely by the burning of fossil fuels and other human activity

This coming year, according to the Met Office, could be one of the warmest ever. This forecast is the latest in a cascade of ominous observations. Just in the last month US scientists warned that West Antarctica was warming twice as fast as expected, and three times faster than the average for the planet as a whole; and the European Space Agency revealed that snow cover in Europe and Asia in June had been the lowest since satellite observations began 45 years ago. It has been a year of extremes, in which the Arctic summer sea ice fell to its lowest ever; in which the 48 contiguous states of the US experienced the hottest ever temperatures and protracted drought; in which wildfires in the tundra darkened snow over Greenland and precipitated melting at an unprecedented rate. The largest Atlantic hurricane on record crippled New York, while Britain, which began the year with one of the driest winters on record, then experienced what for some counties proved to be the wettest year ever.

In global terms, 2012 was probably only the ninth warmest on record. But 11 of the 12 warmest ever have fallen in this young century. The signals could hardly be clearer: climate change is on the way, driven largely by the burning of fossil fuels and other human activity. More than two decades ago, scientists warned that these things would happen: they are happening, and faster than anybody expected.

Climate Change: The United Nations' global warming panel is writing up a report from its most recent meeting. Are we doomed? Hardly. From the looks of leaked drafts, it appears the U.N. has at last discovered reality.

As it's done many times before, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change met in November to assess the threat of man-made global warming. And now it's working on a report intended to scare the masses into believing that humans are burning up their world.

We don't doubt that the final version of the IPCC's fifth report due next year will indeed make the usual attempt to frighten everyone. But for now those who trade in global warming alarmism are having to smooth out a troublesome bump in the report's draft.

Skeptic Alec Rawls, who signed on as a reviewer, leaked a passage from the draft that indicates the IPCC is actually admitting that a factor outside man's activities is playing a significant role in our climate.

"That sentence is an astounding bit of honesty," says Rawls, "a killing admission that completely undercuts the main premise and the main conclusion of the full report, revealing the fundamental dishonesty of the whole."

» How much "Man Made" CO2 Is In The Earth's Atmosphere?
I think ALL of the CO2 in the Earth's Atmosphere is from man.
I'm not sure how much "Man Made" CO2 is in the Earth's Atmosphere.
There is .04% CO2 in the Earth's Atmosphere and of that "Man" has added an extra 4% (1 part in 62,500)